BGE2 Not Yet Gone To The Great Beyond

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It wasn’t happening and then it was happening and then it maybe wasn’t again and now it is again. The cosmic ballet continues. After making the internet en masse do its sex face with news that Michel Ancel’s Beyond Good & Evil 2 was in development and later seeing an apparent leak of some spine-tickling possible concept footage, hope it would happen seemed to evaporate. Silence fell. Grown men wept. Or at least tweeted. Then! Suddenly! As publishers seem to have had some sort of green light to start muttering about next-generation consoles all of a sudden, Ubisoft have joined the fray. Well, abstractly. Contrary to what other sites have been screaming hysterically today, Ancel and his team have not outright stated that the game’s bound for future-devices, instead claiming that the game “needs more tech” and they’ll work out what can actually run it once it’s more or less complete.

I know what can run it: a PC. Lots of PCs, in fact. So you can just release it now, stop worrying about those loungeboxes and the world will be a better place.

As for details, we don’ts gots thems. Well, not many of ’em anyway. “We are in an active creation stage and at this moment we are only focusing on the game and making it the best game that we can,” said Ancel in a French-language video interview since translated by NeoGaf.

He also addresses murmurings that Jade’s return will see her running along the edge of a mirror. “We had this concept even before Mirror’s Edge launched. And we have a different approach to the first person perspective that Mirror’s Edge has. Prince of Persia and Assassin’s Creed are closer to what we have in mind with the control of the character in a third person perspective.”

This is what he’s referring to:

“We use a very dynamic camera that shakes a lot during the action to add life to the camera, giving the impression of an action news cover team following Jade. Maybe that could be similar to Mirror’s Edge but the game itself is very different.”

That sounds just like my life. Cameramen follow me everywhere these days, always hoping that one evening I’ll climb out of a taxi while not wearing any knickers.

It would be quite monstrous of me to leave that as your last mental image resulting from this post, so instead I shall redirect your attention to the picture atop it, which you can click up for bigosity and is alleged to be an in-game screenshot of the game, via AGB.

To be fair, it might be a lot easier when you’re actually controlling the game. You’ll know when you’re about to make a sudden turn and prepare for it. I find lots of videos of all sorts of games slightly headachey to watch, because the player is darting around and I’m not ready for it.

I imagine this is more of a trailer than it is representative of in-game footage… I don’t see how the camera angle they used there would be practical at all for controlling the character. There’s almost no field of view for most of it.

Keep in mind that that video is a very early proof of concept video that wasn’t even supposed to be released to the public. Hence why it looks like it’s pieced together from Assassins Creed and Splinter Cell assets.

I missed the original concept footage leak. It looked very exciting, but I can’t see how it would be playable outside of a string of QTEs. When I was playing Mirror’s Edge at my best I was making one or two direction choices per minute I’d guess. At my worst I was running into walls and stopping to take another run at a tricky jump or to decide on a route.
For example the toilet scene. I would run in, look around, not see the window, turn back around, look for another way, not find one, get shot a bit, turn back around, then try jumping on the toilet.

Yes. Either we end up with QTE’s and diverse environments, or the game has to do something like SMB and deliberately cut down on the fancy graphics so our brains can parse the scenery quick enough to actually get a fluid game going. Mirror’s Edge tried (and kinda failed). This demo? I can hardly follow passively, much less could I play it. And “Do it again until you follow the instructions on the screen perfectly” is not a game.

you know I can’t tell if this is sarcasm :/ combat kinda ruined Mirror’s Edge, for a game about the flow of movement to add an element that breaks that is just bad design. Not as bad as the elevators in the game though!

There is one place in the entire game where combat is unavoidable (two if you count a cutscene). I never really understood why people complain about the combat when the entire point is to run away from it.

When he talks about the tech, I didn’t really take it as meaning “new consoles”, more just “more software”. It might simply mean they need to continue developing tools and evolve their own engine(s). I mean, looking at the concept footage, I saw nothing that couldn’t be done in, say, Uncharted’s engine. They might just need time to optimize what they currently have up to that level.

When Beyond Good and Evil 2 is being released and it is not on PC on day 1 I am going to jump off of the nearest building.
When they say it is because of piracy or include crazy UbiDRM I am going to jump off of 2 buildings.

The footage looked interesting, and I’m more than happy to celebrate a possible BG&E 2. That said, this looks nothing like the first game, doesn’t it? For example, the machine gun sounds felt totally out of place.
(I’m not worried yet, though – this is just demo footage. But part of what made BG&E great for me was that it actively tried to _not_ be yet another “realistic” game. The last RPS Shotcast dealt with this problem, too: A strong aesthetic is more important for graphics than photorealism.)

What we’ve seen so far isn’t much to go on, but I don’t see that problem here. Yes, it has better lighting and things like that, but if they’re striving for added realism in the same way that Pixar does that can only be a good thing. It would be a shame if it turned into a “realistic” brown game, but I don’t see any evidence for that in this clip or the earlier desert one.